Cottleston Pie

In the style of the thematically related double-features of The Paramount Summer Movie Classics, a friend and I staged our own double-feature. We watched the 1959 Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie Pillow Talk followed by the 2003 tribute and parody of those DD/RH movies Down with Love. The double-feature was a great idea. DwL wouldn't have been particularly good without understanding of the material being parodied. It turned out to be quite an entertaining pairing.

MacOS X 10.3 (aka Panther) is fantastic. The performance improvements are dramatic on my 2.5 year old PowerBook G4 (Titanium) laptop (500 MHz G4, 384 Mb). The interface and improvements to Apple's applications such as the Finder, Mail, and Safari are all great as well. Exposé really shines as a new interface feature; I already make heavy use of it.

Further, a friend in the office installed it on his 1999 iMac (400 MHz G3, 384 Mb) and said that the performance improvements were dramatic for him as well.

This was great news, because I plan on giving the gift of Panther to my parents this Christmas for their 1999 iMac (500 MHz G3 320 Mb) which is currently still running MacOS 9. I plan to increase their iMac's memory as well because I think that Fast User Switching will be a boon for them. Even with my laptop, there have been times where it would have been nice to allow guests a nice clean account without me needing to clean up and log out.

Since I recently suffered a hardware failure, I made a clean install. There's nothing like moving to help clarify what is important and what is just cruft.

This seems like an appropriate time to catalog the software that I find particularly useful and necessary. This will especially help me as I set my parents up with OS X.

It surprises me how frequently people mistakenly comment on the wrong entry, but though I don't have many comments here, it has happened more than once.

It is mystifying why one cannot move a comment to a different Entry with the Movable Type application (mt.cgi).

Fortunately, I chose to use external SQL database support rather than the built-in support for Berkeley DB. If I hadn't, I don't know how I would be able to move a comment.

So, my data is in a MySQL database. Given a choice, I'd prefer PostgreSQL, but MySQL is what was available and it serves well enough.

Let me document what I did for myself and anyone else in a similar straight.

1. Connect to the server:

   % mysql -h <SQL-db-hostname> -u <id> -D <db-name> -p
   

2. Identify comment

   In this case, this was the only comment from a particular IP number:

   mysql> SELECT comment_id,comment_blog_id,comment_entry_id,comment_ip,comment_email FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   | comment_id | comment_blog_id | comment_entry_id | comment_ip     | comment_email       |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   |         36 |               1 |               16 | 10.0.0.182     | kom48ff84@yahoo.com |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   

3. Change the comment_entry_id. In this case, moving from Entry 16 to 27:

   mysql> UPDATE mt_comment SET comment_entry_id = 27 WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
   Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0
   

4. Check the result:

   mysql> SELECT comment_id,comment_blog_id,comment_entry_id,comment_ip,comment_email  FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   | comment_id | comment_blog_id | comment_entry_id | comment_ip     | comment_email       |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   |         36 |               1 |               27 | 10.0.0.182     | kom48ff84@yahoo.com |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   

5. Rebuild pages.